It’s Time to Be Outraged About Child Trafficking and Pedophilia
July 16 2020
I found this meme the other day. I have been meaning to up my meme game, so this seemed like a good place to start.
At first, it seems controversial — probably a partisan distraction to an issue right wingers seem to care more from an issue being forwarded most vigorously by the left. But it isn’t. It is really — like most good memes — a blunt and effective expose of collective cognitive dissonance.
Let’s fact check it first. As of mid-July 2020, according to this website, which I assume is legitimate, the total number of worldwide deaths is 576,505.
As I’ve written about before, I’ve got a few issues with the official COVID-19 numbers. Lies, damned lies, and statistics comes to mind. But I’m happy to leave that aside for now, and take them for what they appear to be.
According to the website Global Missing Children’s Network, there were 421,394 reports of missing children in the United States in 2019. Ok, so that isn’t quite up to the COVID numbers, although it may still have been when the meme was originally made. The meme-r is also a bit vague about the time-frame they are referring to for missing children in the United States.
But, anyway, I think we can all agree that this nit-picking is missing the point. This isn’t just about America, even if America is the main culprit: file under '“America’s ability to win at things you don’t want to be winning”, alongside Covid. The story is similar if less acute across other countries: 25,000 per year in Australia; 40,000 in Canada; 80,000 in the UK.
In this context, what does missing actually mean? According to the same website, it includes “any person under the age of 18 whose whereabouts are unknown”. This is a staggering number of children to have been reported missing over the space of 12 months. Many of these cases would be entirely innocent and be quickly resolved. But many wouldn’t be — many become victims in organised child trafficking rings, where they are routinely abused by pedophiles.
According to the US Institute Against Human Trafficking, there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking across the world, 75% of which are women and girls and 25% of which are children — that is, approximately 10 million children who have been trafficked. In reality, however, these numbers are essentially a stab in a very deep dark, given how hidden this practice has been up until recently.
But how often do you hear about it? You get the occasional detailed report like this one from a local news network, sure — which despite being specific to Oregon has had almost 3 million views.
To give mainstream outlets their due, they do not avoid the topic completely. Every major American news outlet — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS — has a story on child sex trafficking online, although none that come up immediately are from 2020. So it is there: you just need to look for it, rather than having it shoved down your throat like many other social issues.
And that’s the thing: alongside other social justice issues — racism, sexism, LGBTQ rights, economic inequality — it barely registers.
There are many reasons for this I’m sure. This is the one I see as most likely. Go to that Oregon video, and go to the comments. Things get wild pretty quickly. Secret underground tunnels. Elite child sacrifice rituals. Satanists and adrenochrome. And, of course, Jeffrey Epstein.
Maybe this is why the subject of missing children is difficult for those who create and take in the mainstream news narrative: once you decide to dig into it, things get conspiratorial pretty quickly.
I wonder how many people are actually aware of the nasty details of what Epstein was up to? When Ricky Gervais made that Golden Globes speech, how many people thought he was being serious?
It is not just the fact that he had an island full of underage girls where famous people came to have sex with. It is also the fact that this was obviously known about for so long without him being arrested, and that even when he was arrested the first time, was given an outrageous plea deal. It is also the fact that — as things start to become a bit more clear with the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell — it seems as though the island was actually a honey-trap set up by various intelligence agencies in order to blackmail powerful people and further the ability of these agencies to manipulate world events.
It is for this reason that I understand why we don’t hear as much as we should about what Epstein and his entourage were up to. If we are to believe the record of names in the flight log of his private passenger plane “Lolita Express” (yuck), this scandal has the potential to implicate many of the most famous people in the world across politics, media, Hollywood and the music industry (if you were hoping that Trump would be on that list: he isn’t, even though the two certainly had ties in the past). Given the close knit nature of America’s elite circles, it is hardly surprising that they would close ranks to protect their own — as much good as this is likely to do if Maxwell is indeed cooperating with law enforcement.
I also understand the reluctance, in many ways, to deal with the issue as a whole. This is dark, nasty stuff, and many people are simply not ready to face up to this collective shadow that our society is casting. Even the reliance on the term ‘trafficking’ puts a more generalised, palatable name on what is at its core a system of sexual abuse by pedophiles.
And I also get how this might be seen as a partisan thing. Donald Trump has made it a central point of his agenda to address human trafficking. While he isn’t without his critics in this regard, by numbers alone he appears to have done far more in enabling the arrest of those responsible for these crimes than the previous administration. Although I don’t want mention of the Orange One to be a distraction, as there has been promising (if uncomfortable) news from around the world of major arrests of child traffickers and pedophiles: Germany, Spain, Nigeria, Canada, Indonesia to name a few.
Then there is the fact that investigations into child trafficking and pedophilia are often associated with those on the political right (unfairly, as it is a focus of Feminist and LGBTQ movements as well). In the case of more fringe theories such as Pizzagate and now the Wayfair scandal, these investigations are typically driven by those prone to donning tin foil hats. With the details of Epstein and now Maxwell open for all to see, however, these previously unhinged conspiracies now become less of a stretch.
But at its heart, this issue obviously isn’t right — literally. It isn’t right why some forms of injustice are given such prominent place in our society — are trumpeted in the media, are championed by our most visible politicians and celebrities, are marched and rioted for by the general public — while another type of indescribably awful injustice still lies largely in the shadows. For too long we have been scared to go into those shadows. We know we can’t overcome our own personal demons without dealing with uncomfortable truths — why would it be any different for us as a society?
I’m not saying to stop caring about other human rights issues. I’m not saying you should stop advocating for the end of overt and systemic racism, including by extension the institutionalised violence consistently inflicted on non-white races both at home and overseas. I’m not saying you should stop advocating for the rights of those of marginalised gender and sexuality. I’m also not saying you should stop advocating for the humane treatment of animals and the natural environment as a whole.
All I’m saying is that you may soon realise that the level of outrage that you have been channeling at these causes may need to be trumped (sorry), when the full extent of this form of injustice fully emerges.
There is no-one more innocent on Earth than a child, no-one more worthy of our righteous search for justice. And there is no-one on Earth more worthy of our disgust, fury and righteous outrage than those who wilfully traffic and abuse them, along with those who have been complicit in and covered up these crimes.
This shit is about to get real, whether you are ready for it or not. So get ready to give it the shits that it deserves.